Watch it, it’s only 7 minutes. I think you’ll find it unsurprising that most people have tagged it as ‘jaw-dropping’.

She makes an incredibly good point, and one that strikes very close to some ideas that have been whizzing around my brain recently. Why do we use physical manifestations to diagnose mental pathology?

We actually diagnose things like depression, ADHD and autism based on observed behaviour. No proof, no science, just… interpretation of physical manifestation. It’s crazy. It’s barbaric. It’s like using leeches to suck out your melancholia. It really makes no sense, when you think about it — as the speaker says in the video: we don’t diagnose a heart condition without first using the technology available! In fact, you’d probably get a medical malpractice suit if you did — yet psychiatrists continue to diagnose children with reckless abandon.

As you can see from the talk, we now have the technology to scan the brain and deduce any extant mental maladies with excellent accuracy. It’s safe, it’s quick and it’s non-invasive. Look at those happy children in the video! Marvel (or glumly gawp) at how many kids with autism, ADHD or any other learning disability might be suffering from something else — something that can be remedied with non-psychoactive drugs.

Yeah! They use it quite a lot for seizure stuff, but not for other mental (learning) disorders, for some reason!

I’d like to know how they diagnose things like ADHD neurologically — and how accurate it is. If you can take the human element (subjectivity, bias, Big Pharma) out of the equation, that has to be a good thing!

Whoa! I had a sense that those disorders were poorly diagnosed, but I guess I figured it was one of those things that couldn’t be helped at the moment. That technology is amazing, and I really hope it catches on quickly. They even make the scanning cap look cute and fun to wear.

I’m trying to decide whether to send the link to my (retired) psychiatrist grandfather. He’s generally fascinated by all things brain-related, but I don’t know whether he ever used to diagnose these disorders and might be offended by the idea that his method was wrong/terribly inaccurate.

I can’t watch the video but….. oh no sod it, I can’t make the comment come out right so in short: When I was depressed, it was 90% the physical manifestations of it that alerted me to it, I didn’t realise how crazy I was going and later, it was only those physical signs (mostly crippling migranes) that alerted me to the fact that I was stressing again.

Yeah, I’m not exactly sure if there’s a cross-over between diagnosis of dyslexia and ADHD — and depression. I’m pretty sure it’s all just chemical imbalance — which of course has physical manifestations (though sometimes undetectable — but this is all about getting the RIGHT diagnosis, I guess

I don’t know if this goes as far as to say ‘no, you’re not depressed’. Maybe that’s the next stage!

Obviously, helping out the children with learning difficulties is a little more important than whether you dish out anti-depressants to everyone that wants ‘em.

I’d send it to him, Eleni — but if he’s like my older relations, it probably won’t change a very stalwart worldview You don’t get to old age by being uncertain about things…

But hey, it MIGHT leave him feeling enlightened — and it’s always worth that chance!

I sat on it before replying, because I’m kind of confused. My son was diagnosed with Aspergers about 2 months ago (or high functioning ASD as the people we see are calling it, although there is much debate amongst experts as to if they are shades of the same or different)

Yes, it makes PERFECT sense, why aren’t we doing this?? Of course you are just observing manifestations of something but not the actual causes, which could be complex and many.

It kind of blows my head off, but what do I do with it? If I trog along to the clinic and say ‘hey, we need to do this’ they will frankly tell me to do one.

The least you could do is ask for their email address and send them a link to the talk! Even if you can’t help out your son immediately, at least you might help out a lot of children in the long run.

The real problem is that we’re still in a very nascent stage of neurological and psychological medicine. But the bit I don’t get is why we still try to cure and/or medicate issues of the brain. It’s not like we attempted a quadruple heart bypass until we knew _how_ — so why do we do things to the brain without definitive proof that we actually know what we’re doing…?

Still, as I said, it’s early days! A lot of people have died, or been misdiagnosed, in the name of medicine!

And hey, your son is probably in the generation that will live for ever